


Gardening by Moonlight

by Jackie Thomas (Jackie_Thomas)



Category: Lewis (TV)
Genre: Assumes the events of S7 and S8 never happen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-16
Updated: 2015-05-16
Packaged: 2018-03-30 20:18:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,858
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3950332
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jackie_Thomas/pseuds/Jackie%20Thomas
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The garden is starting to live now; the new plants trembling in the breeze, the scent sharp and green.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gardening by Moonlight

Friday night at the George IV, the pub a few doors down from the nick. A DCI is retiring to Spain and CID have come out in force to see him off. Lewis finds his jacket, shakes hands with the leaver, downs the last of his pint. He is going before he can have another, before the night tips over into unknown territory. Little does he know.

Now, where’s Hathaway? He’s in the alley at the side of the pub, tie loosened, hair standing up where, at some important, perspiring moment in the debate, he’s put his hand through it. He’s smoking of course and looking at his phone, swaying gently. One of them is swaying.

Lewis goes over to peer at the screen, “That better not be work.”

“How can a delivery between 7am and 8pm be at my convenience?”

“The new fridge?” 

“This is house arrest.”

“I’m going, sergeant.”

“It’s false imprisonment.” James looks up, smiling vaguely at finding Lewis in such close proximity. “Get a cab,” he instructs.

“I will, I will.” 

“Goodnight, sir.”

They kiss. Lips swiftly meeting, a brush of stubbled cheek. Lewis is on his way to the cab office and half way home before he realises what he’s done.

Oh bugger.

 

***

 

Six weeks later. James is sitting on the strip of decking that forms the patio of his new garden. He has a knee drawn up and is resting his arm on it, bottle of beer in hand.

He is taking a break from painting and his work clothes; faded Fela Kuti t-shirt and torn jeans, stand witness to the muted colours of his bedroom wall.

Lewis has come here via B&Q. He had meant to bring a few seedlings and a shrub or two, just to make a start before summer really gets going, but the car ended up looking like the Botanic Garden and he’s got his work cut out for the afternoon. 

One of the first things James did when he moved into the new flat was clear the garden. He stripped away the wild chaos left by the previous owner, painted the fences, scrubbed the decking and the meandering stone pathway, refreshed the gravel around the flower beds and, following consultation with Titchmarsh on the internet, prepared the soil for planting using rotted down manure, courtesy an enterprising sergeant at the police stables.

Then nothing. There were other priorities; the flat is in an old house and a bargain because of the work it needed; a new bathroom, a fitted kitchen, boiler, rewiring, floorboards, plastering. James decided to get it all done in one go. The real question is why he bothered with the garden at all so early in the process.

Lewis cautiously offers to keep an eye on it while the major work is underway and James agrees without hesitation. His heart gives a hopeful squeeze; perhaps they will survive intact.

He had thought, after the George IV, James would ask for a transfer or finally go for promotion. Out of politeness, if nothing else. He doesn’t, they go on as before; nothing is said, and nothing visible has altered in their relationship.

But the texture of the air between them has changed. As if they are caught in that moment, hovering in freeze frame. He senses James watching him now; the gentle probe of x-ray vision as he makes his way around the borders, planting viola, foxglove and dahlia.

He saves lavender for the central bed. It is a rough circle and he has enough to describe the whole circumference. There are rose bushes in three varieties to go in with it; new purple leaves and flowers tightly furled, but promising shades of crimson and coral.

Roses for James, when would he get another chance? He has no doubts, after all, about where he stands on the subject of James Hathaway.

James appears, spade in hand, when it is time to put the roses in, “We should plant marigolds near the roses,” he says. “To stop the aphids.”

“Because marigolds attract insects that eat them?” 

“Hoverfly, lacewings. Or that’s the theory; a planeload of DDT would probably be a better bet.” He digs the first hole and stands back to let Lewis shovel in fertiliser and tap the rose out of the pot it has arrived in. “Did you know aphids breed by parthenogenesis in summer? Meaning embryos develop from unfertilised eggs. So without males. Over and over again so one female can generate thousands.”

“That’s very enterprising.”

“They’re even born pregnant.” James’ unobtrusive collection of phobias features small creatures with no legs or more than four. Making the whole garden flat proposition even more of a mystery. “And ants farm aphids for their secretions. They hold them captive by tranquilising them and pulling off their wings.” This time he actually does shudder.

“Next week I’ll plant marigolds,” Lewis says, attempting to bring a halt to the increasingly anxious aphid dissertation. “I like a marigold.”

The two of them pack soil around the rose and then stand back a moment to admire it before starting on the next.

“And also,” James says, picking up his thread again. “We especially have to look out for Spanish slug eggs.”

“Go on,” Lewis sighs. “Enlighten me.”

“It’s going to be a plague,” he prophesies. “Thousands are going to hatch in summer. Giant indestructible orange things. They eat everything including dead mammals and when disturbed they emit a mucus.”

“I knew an Assistant Chief Constable who did that.” 

“You mock but don’t say I didn’t warn you when you’re breakfast for our new slug overlords.” 

Roses planted, apocalypse foretold, James goes inside to start his bedroom’s second coat. He is back for a smoke as Lewis finishes planting ornamental grasses in two sunny corners. The garden is starting to live now; the new plants trembling in the breeze, the scent sharp and green. 

Lewis accepts another beer from James and goes to the patio to sit on the bench there, his muscles registering complaints about activity more strenuous than hovering over corpses.

“I like the grasses with the gravel stones,” James says as he wanders through examining everything. “And the lavender. I mean, it’s all lovely. Thank you.”

“It’s good to get my hands in the earth again, I must admit.”

James lights a cigarette and gazes out, falling silent. He is too far away, too impossible to read like this. There is a spider, a leggy little sod, exploring the wide barren expanse of decking and he’s letting it get closer.

When the cigarette is smoked he glances back at Lewis, “Can I tell you something?” 

“Tell me,” Lewis says to the long, lean back.

“This garden. I got it for you.”

Lewis looks at the patch of ground. The flowers, mostly neat little folded buds, turn their heads to listen. The old shed lists forward in anticipation.

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s for you.”

“James, I-“

“Only if you want it.”

He is accustomed to his sergeant’s acts of generosity, this is something more. “But why?”

“I know you miss it.” James’ shrug is noncommittal, evasive even. He doesn’t want the conversation, “Do you think you’d want to take it on?”

“It’d be a pleasure, James.”

James smiles a small, pleased smile, “I’d better get back to it,” he says and disappears inside.

 

***

 

Three months later, Saturday night. They are following a lead when they should have gone home hours ago. If they sleep they might wake to mutilated corpse number four.

Lewis’ exhaustion sits heavily behind his eyes as they speak to a bouncer named Benedetti at the door of his nightclub. Hathaway’s questions are precise over the sledgehammer beat of music coming from inside, through his own caffeine fuelled tiredness. Benedetti, a solidly built Londoner in his thirties, appears cheerfully obliging but Lewis is starting to sense something not right about him.

The case breaks unexpectedly. The man makes a mistake, mentioning a detail from the first crime scene held back from the press, and transforms himself from witness to suspect. He realises his error at the same time as they do and makes a break for it, shoving Lewis out of the way. Lewis stumbles, doesn’t fall, but knocks his head against a sharp angle of concrete. James takes off in pursuit.

By the time Lewis stops seeing stars and catches them up, Benedetti is on the floor, howling about a broken arm and James is practically on top of him phoning for assistance. This is not how restraint of an unarmed man is supposed to go.

When Lewis gets back to the station after a couple of hours in A&E having his head examined, James who clearly ought to, has made an admission of excessive force to Innocent and resigned.

Innocent handles the whole thing effortlessly. She informs Benedetti, who had not broken anything, he would not be charged with assaulting the police officer he ‘put in hospital’ if he forgets about what happened when he ‘resisted arrest’. He guesses correctly that this assault is the only charge for which they have solid evidence and agrees.

Lewis is instructed to take James home and make sure he doesn’t do anything else stupid ‘for crying out loud’. Though with his pounding head and James’ black mood, he’s not sure how he is meant to manage this.

There is a tired conversation outside Lewis’ flat. James wants to drop him off, go home and stay there, alone. And because Lewis knows how well it usually goes when James turns his anger inwards, he decides not to let him. He tells him he is needed for overnight head injury checks as this is something he would not refuse. It is a lie, he didn’t sustain much of a bump. He’s got an impressive bruise to show for the evening’s work, but his headache is entirely Hathaway related.

So they go inside. It is well into the early hours now and Lewis makes toast from stale bread; standing up in the kitchen to eat while James ignores his and tries to conceal, by keeping them in his jacket pockets, the fine tremor in his hands. 

It is then that Lewis remembers his spare room is crammed with boxes containing his sergeant’s book and CD libraries. There is a portrait of Grandma Hathaway as a young woman on the bed along with a big stone head, a mandolin and two woks. Furthermore, the sofa is not big enough to accommodate more than one of his sergeant’s limbs at a time. Okay, so.

“I know she wants me to dispense some words of wisdom,” he says washing down the toast with a glass of water. “But I don’t have the strength and I think we should go to bed.” James raises an eyebrow, suggesting he has already identified the flaw in the sleeping arrangement equation. “Don’t make a fuss. My bed’s big enough for two if you don’t fling your arms and legs about too much.”

James almost smiles. “Yes, sir,” he says.

 

***

 

“If you don’t deadhead you won’t get any more flowers,” Lewis says. 

They are in the garden, four days later on a hot, cloudless afternoon. He is concentrating on the dahlia patch, blooming furiously, determined to disprove him.

“Can we not talk about dead heads?” James says.

“Oh. Fair enough.”

The urgency of the Benedetti case did not diminish with his arrest. The evidence against him was weak and release without charge became a looming possibility. Lewis spent two days in the interview room, painstakingly eroding his defence until he had condemned himself without actually admitting to anything. At the same time, James led a search for physical evidence; unearthing, among other things, the second victim’s missing head. 

It had been a bleak and bloody case and Lewis is finding echoes of it in the fleshy pink of the flowers he is tending to. He needs a few days to dispel the sights he has seen. So does James, but only the Chief Super invoking the European Working Time Directive finally persuades him to take today off. 

Until the triple murder swallowed every hour of daylight Lewis had been taking advantage of the tacit permission he received (of which they never speak) to drop in on his way home, to water and weed, prune and plant. But it is more than a list of tasks. The garden is rarely far from his thoughts; it has taken root in his imagination as firmly as each new plant takes to the soil. It is this, and not the brutal case that makes him think it might be time, at last, to retire, to refocus his attentions from death to life.

Now, in August, the garden is rich with growth. The borders overflow with colour, pots line the paths and patio; verbena, cosmos, begonia and all the others he couldn’t quite leave behind in the garden centre. The roses are doing well too, in the bed they share with the lavender, marigolds and whole dynasties of greenfly. 

He visits after work and at weekends, mostly while James is still at his desk. James tells him to wait, stay for a drink, enjoy the sunshine until he gets back. But surely, he will wear out his welcome this way.

James had been persuaded not to resign as they both stared up at Lewis’ bedroom ceiling after an unexpectedly good night’s sleep, Monty chaperoning between them. But nothing is resolved, and this latest business has, in some as yet undefined way, complicated matters further. 

James is with him now though, fixing a trellis for honeysuckle and, having declared his intention to cook, keeping an eye on the casserole in the oven. It is almost ready as the sun begins to set and, once they have given everything a good water, they go inside.

Later when they’ve eaten and opened a second bottle of wine James steps outside for a smoke. Lewis joins him after the plates are cleared. The night is seeded with stars and they contemplate the bright, round disc of moon shining on Oxford tonight.

James has noticed it seems, the night-blooming flowers Lewis planted to suit his sergeant’s unsocial hours and any passing moths. Mirabilis growing on the patio shows off its many colours, the night-stock scents the air and evening primrose only now opens its luminous yellow eye.

“There are some crops that get harvested at night,” James says, taking a drag of his cigarette and pinching off dead blooms to prove he has been paying attention. “Like jasmine flowers for oil, because that’s when the scent is strongest.”

“We should have jasmine,” Lewis says, the fresh air and wine softening the edges of his thoughts. “Though gardening in the dark sounds a risky business. You’re quite likely to step on your clippers.”

“Gardeners are bold and brave,” James observes. 

Lewis tops up their wine and brings the glasses outside. He takes his usual place on the bench while James gets his guitar and sits on the floor, back against it, playing quiet bits of tune without start or end. The wine has loosened his tongue and a few more gardening philosophies are aired. Islamic sanctuary and Japanese asymmetry, the ecological efficiency of a traditional cottage garden and what to do, according to Titchmarsh, about whoever’s been eating the buddleia.

James is not relaxed despite doing his best to give the appearance of it. It is normal to take time to wind down from a case like Benedetti but Lewis has been hearing the slow tick of a time bomb since the weekend. How long can they go on; piling secrets upon secrets?

“Can we talk about what happened on Saturday?” He finds himself asking.

James doesn’t turn or look up but his tone is cool, “Shouldn’t we do this at work?” 

“This is a private conversation, in my opinion.”

And James falls silent.

“There’s a reason officers who are involved with each other aren’t meant to work together,” Lewis says, lighting the fuse wire. “They can’t respond professionally to things that happen in the normal course of police work if it impacts on their partner or partnership.”

“You’re suggesting we’re involved?” James asks, incredulous or apparently so.

“No, but more than colleagues, wouldn’t you say?”

It is both easier and impossible to have this conversation with the recently cropped top of his sergeant’s head.

“I was going to ask for a transfer to another station,” James says eventually. “To get out of your hair. I can still do that.”

“That’s not what I want. But I am sorry for embarrassing you. What I did was unforgiveable.”

The black cloth of another silence unfolds between them. When James finally speaks he says, “It wasn’t just your doing, you must know that.”

“I didn’t know. Though I wondered. I never know what you’re thinking.” He waves the implied criticism away. “But this is my fault. I can’t expect you to speak if I won’t.”

“Sir,”

“Yes, James.”

“Don’t speak. I’m sorry. But please don’t.”

 

****

 

He is over the limit so he walks. It is too short a walk and he is home before he can calm down, before he can sort out his thoughts. Restlessly prowling the flat doesn’t help so he sinks down on to the sofa, hands clasped in front of him with only the denunciations of his inner prosecuting barrister for company.

How could he have read things so wrong? How could he have made this final and irrevocable misjudgement and lost his friend for good? A man his age, to behave in such a way. Pathetic. He’ll have to go; that’s certain. Get retirement sorted, sell up, move to Manchester and leave the poor man in peace.

The buzz of the entry phone brings him to abrupt consciousness sometime after midnight. James is here, though venturing no further than the doorway until permitted.

He is holding something cradled in the crook of his arm. It is only when Lewis has properly adjusted to the fact of his presence he notices it is flowers, loosely wrapped in newspaper; a mass of sky blue, magenta and terracotta from the more abundant corners of their plot. 

“Is it all right me being here?” 

“You never have to ask that,” Lewis tells him. He must be here to deliver an awkward apology and a more comprehensive goodbye. Let him speak, let’s get it done.

“I thought you’d grow vegetables,” James says at last. “I thought we’d have rows of carrots and potatoes. Shows what I know. You’ve made an Eden.” He puts the bundle into Lewis’ arms. “Harvested by moonlight. I did step on your clippers.”

He tears back the newspaper to free more flowers from the roll of paper. A single, just open rose among the freesias, asters and spikes of silver ghost. 

“I’m not alone by accident,” he says. “Sometimes I think I’m incapable of properly being with someone. I miss all the cues, miss my step, have the wrong feelings. I’ve got some crucial piece of the jigsaw missing.”

“I’ve never heard such rubbish.”

James smiles, “You’re the only one who doesn’t see it. I never even thought I belonged in the human race until you came along and just acted as though I did. But I know it’s more than that. You’ve been sending me these gentle, beautiful messages for so long now and I haven’t known what to do with them.”

“You knew then?”

“Don’t be embarrassed. I wanted to give you something back. As much as I can. So I got you a garden. Though sometimes I think it’s just a selfish little trap.”

You think you don’t know me, you think I’m a mystery. But you know me better than anyone, better than anyone ever has. So you know what a catastrophe I am in a hundred different ways. But what there is of me; this broken machine, this cold fish, this collection of rhyming couplets and useless facts, it’s yours. And perhaps we shouldn’t be working together because if anyone thumps you, they’re going to get thumped back.”

 

****

 

Valerie schooled him in love, Morse in the endless complexity of the human soul. How else would he have known where to start with James Hathaway? 

But it was his grandma who taught him to garden; to know the soil, to tell the pests from the pollinators, to nurture the tiniest, most fragile of shoots creeping up from the earth as carefully as the lankiest of beanpoles.

Autumn is here. The garden fruits and then becomes dormant, the bees abandon the lavender. These are signs of the long winter ahead. Lewis cuts back dead growth and makes plans for next year; maybe a greenhouse or a tree or two. There is a scent of rain in the air and a jostling crew of house sparrows perch by the bird feeder, fat and round against the chill. James has been busy planting bulbs. Tulips and crocuses mainly. Neither of them are sold on daffodils; they’ve got too much to say for themselves according to James. He stops work as James appears with mugs of tea, Monty at his heels.

“Nearly done,” Lewis says, straightening up with the usual set of objections from the usual muscles. “That’s it more or less until spring.”

“So what are we supposed to do with ourselves now? Hibernate?” James speaks as though the turn of the season is the result of an unforgiveable oversight on the part of management. He has unexpectedly sprouted green fingers, often out here at the same time as preparing for long overdue promotion.

It is, however, a good question. Lewis has been so busy with the garden he’s hardly noticed the passing hours of his retirement. He had his send-off at the George IV, (with a commemorative kiss in the side alley to close the evening) and hasn’t looked back. He does have a few suggestions about what to do with the winter months but they can wait until later, until they can be whispered in the moonlit darkness of their bedroom.

Lewis takes his tea to the patio bench, though it is too cold now to spend much time outside. James occupies a favourite spot on the decking beside him and shivers when Lewis strokes his hair. 

There is space at the far end of the garden where the oversized shed is quietly falling to pieces and he thinks about how it can be put to use.

“Maybe we could keep bees.” He unwisely suggests.

“Yes, let’s keep a swarm of angry insects ten yards from where we sleep.”

“Right, sorry pet. What about a pond?”

“That sounds less terrifying.”

“We might get a few frogs and they can take over your slug liaison duties.”

“Sold,” James says.

Lewis stills his hand on a downy curve of skull and James shifts against him. The birds take off into the sky, swooping and circling before disappearing. A cold breath of wind stirs the garden and the evergreens yearn for the return of the sun and an insect kiss.

 

End

 

May 2015


End file.
